LNIM105 Transcript: How to Get Back on Track

Let’s hear what Cliff has to say as he outlines his takeaways from the science of achievement as explained by Tony Robbins.

Cliff: Here are the three mandates or keys to effective leadership.

1. See things as they really are, but refuse to ever see them as worse than they are.

2. You need to see it as better than it is. You have to have vision and visualize what does it look like and feel like to have achieved success in resolving that problem or overcoming that obstacle.

3. Once you have seen it for what it really is and you see it as better than what it is, you have the vision, take action and make it that way.

Those are the three keys to effective leadership.

The episode where Cliff discusses the science of achievement can be found over at PodcastAnswerMan.com/465. That’s his 465th episode. Tell him you heard about him over here on Late Night Internet Marketing, that always makes him smile.

In a particular case where you’re off track, like I was this summer, I think the first thing that Cliff describes is actually the most critical. When we get off track it’s a disappointment and we haven’t done what we’ve said we were going to do, so in many cases we may have let someone down. It can be a really debilitating feeling.

In my case I had committed to release this niche site course, which I am still going to release over at LateNightAffiliate.com, and it wasn’t done. I was off track. I had committed to this, I had made a big deal out of it, and I didn’t do it. Not only did I let myself down, but I let down people who really need that course and are looking forward to it, and perhaps had planned their summer where they would have time to work on it. People had signed up and were waiting to hear from me about when this course would be available, and I didn’t deliver.

It was a very debilitating, kind of depressing thing where you feel like, “Ugh, this is so terrible, I’ve done this thing.” You can get down on yourself in that case. For me, I’m a pretty positive guy, but it’s real easy to imagine situations where you could go, “I’m such a failure, I’m never going to get this right. I’m in this pattern over and over again. I say I’m going to do things and I don’t get them done. Woe is me. This business is never is going to work out because I have all of these obstacles and things just aren’t going my way.”

The first idea in the science of achievement is to recognize things for exactly what they are and not worse than they are. The truth of the matter is I didn’t meet my commitments and I can own that say I didn’t do this, but really that is pretty much the extent of it. Maybe there are some customers out there that are very disappointed that I didn’t meet my commitments, but truth of the matter is so many of them understood completely what was going on. For a lot of them, they were just signed up for the course to help me complete the course. It didn’t ruin their lives.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t meet your commitments, but the truth of the matter is this isn’t a world ending crisis. This is a missed goal. It’s unfortunate that it was missed. We don’t want to do that. But, that’s pretty much the extent of it.

The first thing to do when you’re off track is to really take inventory of what it is that this means for you.

Being off track is something that when put into context of the bigger picture a lot of times is perhaps not that big of a deal. For example, if you compare where I am now compared to where I was in 2007, I’ve made an enormous amount of progress in this business. I started with no website, no followers, no podcast, no affiliate commissions, no products, no additional website properties, no knowledge about affiliate marketing, and I built up all of these things. In that context, I’ve actually made some progress. In the context of time elapsed since 2007, which has been nine going on 10 years now, a three or four month delay is a pretty small thing.

I think the first thing to do in these cases is exactly what the science of achievement suggests, as Cliff described it, which is to just say this is what it is and it’s not bigger than that. The world has not ended. There is still plenty of opportunity out there. People still want the course that I’ve committed to design. I can still do it. It’s late, but that’s all it is, it’s just late.

That’s the first thing. I think you can always do that when you’re off track. You can take stock and realize what it is.

I think the second thing for the science of achievement is equally as important. It goes back to the course that I mentioned earlier, the visioneering from The Art of Power Goaling. It turns out that if you’re in a situation or at a place, or under a condition, or at a spot in your life and you want to be somewhere else, the important thing to do is to imagine that result.

For me what that looks like is getting back to work and understanding that the end product is this product release that really helps people, and is successful in the marketplace, and that causes people to be able to improve their lives, and allows me to generate revenue and is something that I can be proud of, so on and so on. I can envision what that looks like and what it takes to get there.

Visualizing that thing, it turns out in this Tony Robbins part of the universe where neuro-linguistic programming is a thing, that allows your mind to start finding solutions to get the ship turned in the right direction. Tony Robbins and people who are doing this kind of work will tell you that once you set your mind to doing a thing it’s like setting the GPS destination in your car. Your car will find the route. If you tell it you want to go from here to the football stadium and you don’t quite know how to get there, that’s not a problem for your GPS, it will puzzle out the route.

Tony Robbins and others in this field will tell you that your mind is very similar. If you imagine the destination in your mind that over time your subconscious mind and your conscious mind when you’re actually working on it will work together to find solutions to problems that will allow you to get to where you need to be. They argue that this is what happens when you’re brushing your teeth and all of a sudden up from your subconscious mind comes a solution to some problem that you’ve been thinking about for the last two weeks. You’ve figured out what it is that you want to do and then while you’ve slept or while you weren’t thinking about it your subconscious mind is churning on those problems and it will offer up solutions in the shower or while you’re brushing your teeth.

This is not too different. Step one is to realize the problem for what it is. Step two is to visualize where it is that you want to go.

For me what that meant was realizing what I want to do is finish this course and I want to do it by the end of the year. It’s really that simple. It’s not much more complicated than that.

What this amounts to, as Cliff describes it – I love the words Cliff uses and I’m sure they rely heavily on what Tony teaches – you refuse to see things as worse than they are. See what’s really there, but refuse to see them as worse than they are. Then have the courage to see them as better than they are right now. Visualize where you want to go is the way I’m expressing it, but the words Cliff uses are see them as better than they are. Where is it that you want to go?

Then the third thing is obviously just make it happen. Go get it done. Do the work. Commit to doing what it is that you need to do. Let the past be in the past. Rock ‘n roll, get after it, go get it done.

How do you get back on track when you’ve gotten off track? It’s really simple.

Don’t despair, just see things as they really are. In my case, the way they really were was a three or four month delay in my world plan. I’m going to live for approximately 100 years, I’m four months behind what I wanted to be. Big deal.

Visualize what it is that you want. I want to release a successful course that people love and that really benefits people in their internet marketing journey.

Go get it done. That’s what I’m doing, I’m going and getting it done with the goal of releasing this thing by the end of the year. Easy peasy.

I hope that helps you. If you talk to Cliff, go give him a shout out on Twitter and tell him you heard about him on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. That will make him smile.

Late Night Niche Site Update

The next thing I wanted to talk about was the niche site. We’ve been talking about the Late Night Niche Site. In Episode 98 we talked about exactly what you could do to brainstorm a list of niches. Then in Episode 103 we talked about how to down-select from those niches and we talked about finding a niche that was commercially viable, where you were interested, where you had stuff to talk about, and those sorts of things. If you’re looking for a way to pick a niche out of a sea of potential niches that we talked about generating in Episode 98, Episode 103 tells you how to do that.

One of the examples that we talked about was youth baseball. We’re going to pick that one and we’re going to build a site right here on the podcast and we’ll talk about it week over week and talk about how that goes.

Today what I wanted to talk about was why did I choose youth baseball as my example. I will tell you the criteria that I set out in Episode 103 are met very well.

My personal level of interest in youth baseball right now is very high. I have a 9-year-old kid who would love to play second base every day for the rest of his life and I’m coaching a youth baseball team, so my interest is very high.

The second criteria is there is a lot of stuff to talk about in youth baseball. You can talk about news and trends and what’s going on in youth baseball. You can talk about how to run good youth baseball practices. You can talk about how to be a good youth baseball coach with regard to managing the team and parents, best practices, all that sort of stuff. You can talk about tools for youth baseball coaching – software tools, practice tools, and gear. You can talk about kids gear and so on. There is just all kinds of stuff.

In addition, I can tell personal stories (if I choose to) about what’s going on with my youth baseball team that might be interesting to an audience. And I’m sure there are a dozen other things, a dozen other large topics that I could talk about with regard to youth baseball. Just with regard to equipment, I can get down to a lot of specifics about gloves, baseball bats, and training gear. Those are really three separate very large topics. There are also a lot of online courses available for coaches on how to run baseball practice.

Those last four topics – gloves, training gear, bats, and the courses – also have strong commercial opportunities, because a lot of those items are quite expensive and they all have affiliate programs. These commercial criteria that I set out in Episode 103 – are there ads in Google, are their products on Amazon to sell – all of that is possible and is out there, so that all is great.

In addition to that, from a competition standpoint, when I go and look at the competition in Google and I just look around at the different websites that are out there for the kinds of phrases that I might imagine competing against, there is a lot of strong competition out there, there are strong websites in the space, but I don’t see a bunch of stuff out there that is completely dominating page one of Google to the point where I don’t think I can rank. I know I can rank. We’ll talk about that as time goes on.

So, my intention now for a niche website for us to talk about is to create a new niche website in the youth baseball space. By the way, if you really want to get down into the nitty-gritty details about how this is going to be done, this is the website that I’m also building for the Late Night Affiliate course. In that course it’s the example site that I use. Obviously on the podcast we don’t have time to go through all of the details, but youth baseball is the example that we’re going to talk about. In some future episode of the podcast I’m going to release the actual URL for that website so you’ll be able to go look at it. We’ll talk about it over the months, and probably years, about how it does and so forth.

That’s the update on the Late Night Niche Site. If you have questions about niche selection, about your niche, and so forth, leave a comment in the show notes for this episode over at LateNightIM.com/105 or send me a message at [email protected].

Wrapping Things Up…

That wraps it up for me today. Full transparency here, I am actually late night internet marketing at 4:00 in the morning because I was busy on a conference call with Asia last night for my day job. It turns out that people in Asia sleep during the day. I don’t know what’s up with that, something about the rotation of the Earth and the sun. Sometimes when I want to talk to them I have to be up late at night, and I was last night, so I didn’t get to record this.

And I’m committed to getting this podcast to you on a weekly basis. It’s another one of those science of achievement things. Podcast not coming out regularly, that’s not as big a deal as it feels like to me, it’s just is what it is, I haven’t done what I said I was going to do in the past. I’m back on track. I can visualize a world where my podcast comes out every week and people are counting on it, they wait by their iPods or their iPhones or their electronic devices for the thing to download, and then they listen to it and it makes their life better every week. That’s my visualization. It comes out no matter what and they count on it, and they’re happy. I know how to do that is to be committed and do it, so I’m up at 4:00 in the morning recording.

Now I’m going to go take a shower, which I do almost every day, and go to Doughnuts for Dads with my 9-year-old over at the elementary school. I will not eat a doughnut. My lifestyle is a lifestyle that does not involved high carbohydrate super high glycemic index foods. I’m more of a broccoli and grilled meat kind of guy these days. Unless they have broccoli and grilled meat doughnuts, which sound absolutely disgusting, I’ll be drinking coffee. But, I’ll be sitting with my youngster who is very excited about Doughnuts with Dads this morning.

It’s really good to talk to you guys. I will see you next week. When I look at the schedule for next week, it looks like we will be talking about my carefully researched layperson’s view of content and intellectual property law. Back in Episode 104 we did the 10 Business Commandments and we used some intellectual Lin-Manuel Miranda in that episode, and I mentioned this thing about fair use and copyright, fair use as a defense and copyright infringement and so forth. We’re going to talk about all of that and how it applies to you and your websites, particularly in affiliate marketing where you might be tempted to steal images from Amazon and other places, when you can do that, when is it okay. I’m going to give you my non-binding legal opinion, even though I’m not a lawyer.